


Less Miserables

by cruisedirector



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Denial, Drabble, Kissing, M/M, Middle Aged Virgins, Parents & Children, Police, Regret, Religion, Reunions, Unrequited Lust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-05
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 02:06:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/831470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Les Mis drabbles. Oops. There will probably be updates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rosary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even prayer is distracting.

Javert murmurs Hail Marys, yet he loses count. The beads grow warm in his fingers. They had not been warm the first time he held them, but the mayor's fingers had warmed Javert's where they touched.

God might forgive Javert for miscounting if he clutched the beads while meditating on the Mysteries. But the mysteries that preoccupy Javert do not concern the Lord. He wonders about Madeleine's wanderings, his charity, his solitude. He wonders how Madeleine's hands would feel touching Javert's face.

Javert knows that he should use a different rosary. Yet he can't bear to set this one aside.


	2. Distancing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marius can't make amends.

Cosette mourns, but with her father gone, she turns to her husband for comfort. It is enough for her that Valjean forgave him.

She is not wracked with guilt like Marius, who knows that he destroyed Valjean. Valjean might have suggested distancing himself from his daughter, but Marius had too eagerly agreed, keeping his angel from the man who raised her.

Valjean always put Cosette first. He wished only that Marius would be a devoted husband.

Yet when he looks at her now, Marius is reminded of what he did to Cosette and her father both, and wants to hide.


	3. Suffocation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Javert's waited a long time.

He’s lived for one thing all these years: the day when he’ll arrest Valjean. He’s fantasized about it with a fervor some might find obscene.

Yet it’s truly obscene that Javert stands transfixed now, as if no time has passed, as if Valjean is still the prisoner who’d caught his eye or the mayor he’d so wanted to impress.

“Are you unwell?” asks Valjean, again the man of mercy, concern for Javert overriding his urge to flee.

If he were well, Javert wouldn’t clutch at Valjean like a drowning man. He certainly wouldn’t try to draw breath from his lips.


	4. Restitution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marius struggles with compromises.

Marius opens a door and finds them kissing, his wife's father and the policeman, the spy and his executioner, the officer whom Marius once had thought to summon to punish a criminal and the criminal's intended victim.

His first reaction is revulsion. Men are not meant to touch each other so. It is a sin if not a crime.

But such dilemmas are not new to Marius. He has been a Royalist, then a Bonapartist; he has felt indebted to Thenardier yet despised him.

He owes his life to Valjean, and to Javert. He closes the door, and says nothing.


	5. Fortitude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Valjean is strong. Javert is weak.

It's his guiltiest pleasure, watching 24601 use those vigorous muscles to perform great feats. Javert gravitates toward men of different sorts of power, men of authority and status, not beasts like this prisoner. Yet Valjean's strength arouses him in ways no magistrate or supervisor has ever done.

Until Monsieur Madeleine. In the mayor, Javert finds an irresistible combination of personal and magisterial force. He feels no guilt until he watches Madeleine lift a heavy cart and recognizes not the man so much as his response to the man.

Then Javert sees his own weakness. He vows to lock it away.


	6. Grace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Javert longs for requital.

For weeks Javert insists on patrolling the quarter, so devoted that he is offered a post in Paris. Long after he knows the trail has gone cold, he finds new reasons to enter the street where he lost Jean Valjean.

Years pass before Javert admits that if he can never arrest the man, he desperately wants to see him just one more time.

Always Javert looks. Work fails to distract him, even when revolution simmers in the streets. Only when he gazes at the face of the man who will kill him does Javert know the bliss of satisfied longings.


	7. Presumption

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Madeleine wants no indebtedness.

Madeleine knows why they stare, many women and some men. He pretends that they regard the signs of his wealth or office, but then someone cracks a crate or shatters a chimney and they call to him, watching as he uses his muscles to help.

It's not that he's ungrateful. In Toulon, his strength kept him safe from convicts and guards alike. He remembers the gaze of one guard in particular, resentment subverted by awe.

Madeleine doesn't like to admit that Javert's gaze gave him confidence. If impudence helped forge the man he has become, he is in Javert's debt.


	8. Kinship

For minutes at a time, Javert loses himself in the role. He not only accepts but appreciates the smiles, the pats on the back, the nods of gratitude. This would have been difficult for him when he was younger, when he could bear no identity besides that of a policeman, yet now he enjoys these borrowed clothes.

His delight should arise from the successful infiltration, yet he feels pleasure at the warmth of his welcome by the men. Here, it doesn't matter who his parents were. Here, no one will question his merits.

More reasons these students are so dangerous.


	9. Leap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is not the sin he wants.

There’s more than one way to fall into darkness. Once he realizes that, Javert knows that this is not the sin he wants to commit. He retraces his steps, knocks on the door, greets the resigned man with an outstretched hand.

There’s more than one kind of prison, too, and more than one way to escape it.

Perhaps Valjean is even right that there’s more than one way to be just, though this feels more like mercy than justice. Javert would rather live with this mistake than die for the other.

Let them write that he jumped off the bridge.


End file.
